What's wrong with wayland?

[jonsmirl at gmail.com]

On Sun, Feb 20, 2011 at 2:35 PM, Enrico Weigelt <weigelt at metux.de> wrote:
> * Marty Jack <martyj19 at comcast.net> schrieb:
>
>> If remote clients is your thing, instead of forecasting doom
>> because the old way may not work any more, first off, nothing
>> stops someone from writing a thing that listens on port 6000
>> and acts just like a remote X server only it is a Wayland
>> client, and second off,
>
> At this point, I fail to see the real benefit of Wayland, at
> least from user or infrastructure view. (yes, having the hw
> and composition part of the fat Xserver IMHO is a good thing
> from sw-architectural view).
>
> One thing that annoys me is that the current design papers
> explicitly take remoting out of the picture (almost declares
> that obsolete or tells people to use insufficient workarounds
> like VNC) and delegates a lot of things to individual clients
> (so in the end introducing massive code and data duplications).

There is an excellent emerging protocol for app remoting called HTML5.
Code your app as an HTML5 app and problem solved. Nothing stops you
from running both the client and server parts on a single machine. Gee
- we just did that with the Xserver. If you do this your app is cross
platform and also able to be immediately used in a cloud environment.
HTML5 graphics can do everything desktop graphics do so there is no
real loss in changing your coding model.

Coding for the existing desktop model is backwards looking. HTML5 is
building for the future. Look at ChromeOS. HTML5 based apps are the
only kind of app that you can run. If you need extreme graphics speed
check out Google's NaCl project.




>
>> nothing stops someone from redesigning and rethinking what
>> the proper remote protocol is,
>
> I'd start with an proper model before starting to think about
> an specific protocol: why should a client still be responsible
> for drawing, instead of just describing what it wants to have
> displays (eg. an scene graph or something more hi-level) ?
>
> Typical GUI applications have concepts of windows (and windows
> within windows), widgets, etc. Those are all objects that can
> be described formally and rendered in a hi-level display server.
> This also would allow large savings of now heavily duplicated
> code and data in the individual clients.
>
> 8 1/2 could be a interesting conceptional starting point.
>
>> using modern encryption and compression techniques and whatever
>> else is needed to get a VNC like solution that performs well
>> and is secure.
>
> VNC can not be done right that way, as it's conceptionally
> meant for a whole different purpose: it operates on screen level.
> It has no idea windows, server-side resource objects, etc.
> Simply lacks this information.
>
>
> cu
> --
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Enrico Weigelt, metux IT service -- http://www.metux.de/
>
>  phone:  +49 36207 519931  email: weigelt at metux.de
>  mobile: +49 151 27565287  icq:   210169427         skype: nekrad666
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>  Embedded-Linux / Portierung / Opensource-QM / Verteilte Systeme
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-- 
Jon Smirl
jonsmirl at gmail.com